Horror! Comics! Anger!

Main Menu

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) [REVIEW]

This film marks the shit officially hitting the fan, which happens to also be made out of shit, creating a huge explosion of shit all over the place, making everyone puke into their own hands, and rub their puke-covered hands all over their faces. No seriously, this movie was bad. Corey Feldman‘s character from the first movie was apparently named Tommy, and he is the main character of “New Beginning“, now being played by John Shepherd. Tommy lives in an orphanage type place and takes medication for the hallucinations he has involving Jason Voorhees. People start getting killed at the orphanage place and soon everyone is on the chopping block. Who could the murderer be?! Well, we eventually see that Jason is the one killing people, and Tommy, along with friends, eventually confront and “kill” Jason. When they remove the hockey mask, it turns out to not be Jason, but a paramedic who saw his son killed in the beginning of the film by one of the kids at the orphanage thing. Tommy goes to the hospital where he finally overcomes his fear of Jason, and when one of his friends comes in to the hospital to check on him, Tommy jumps out wearing Jason’s hockey mask and is wielding a knife, then the movie ends.

The much more extreme way to play “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”.

I guess I can see what they were going for, in theory, but it was a shitty idea. We care about NONE OF THESE CHARACTERS, so trying to show the psychological aspect of what killing Jason does to someone is quite pointless. Why does Tommy start killing people after overcoming his “fear” of Jason? Why not just make that the whole movie? Granted, that would have been an obvious path to take for the series, but it’s not like it’s a series of films known for being subtle. Did you really think it would be that far-fetched to have Jason come back to life? The continuity with Jason’s mask is really confusing as well, and you have a hard time keeping things straight. It was shown for two films to have a red triangle right on the brow, and then two triangles on the cheeks pointing towards the nose. I understand that it isn’t really Jason, so it’s not the same mask, but it seems like they got the masks confused on this film because subsequent films seem to keep swapping back and forth between red triangles and blue/black triangles. This movie is where the series really starts falling apart, and somehow, it continues to get worse, and we’re only at number five. Five more shit shows to go!